Ask your staff

Who knows more about an organisation’s internal workings than its staff? For this reason, many organisations have developed sophisticated methods for mining their staff for that valuable commodity – good ideas.

This doesn’t just mean putting up a “suggestion box” in a corner and hoping that a few members of staff might contribute. Rather, processes have been developed to encourage a high level of employee innovation. Organisations who do so argue that it represents an investment that pays dividends.

“One of the big sources of ideas in MasterCard is our employees,” says Garry Lyons, the company’s chief innovation officer globally who is based in Ireland. “You need to put in place structured processes to get those ideas, you have to find ways to focus the ideas.”

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The efforts made at MasterCard worldwide are light years away from the old suggestion box. “We have sophisticated innovation processes in MasterCard which go across the life cycle of products. I believe innovation is a repeatable process. We can use it to improve processes, improve prototyping, and to take innovations to market.”

Many ideas are worth hearing but they have to have more if they are going to be introduced. The company uses crowd-sourcing processes, it gets staff to respond to ideas, encourage them to vote on them and build on them, Lyons adds.

“We found that a great source of ideation. Over the past year, 1,000 ideas moved forward and 25 are being introduced. We would not have got them if innovation had not been opened up to employees.”

The company runs innovation competitions to encourage staff to submit ideas. They run an online brainstorming platform called Aspire to gather good ideas and hold innovation days where employees work with different colleagues and exchange ideas. It will actually help staff patent their good ideas if appropriate and many of its innovation methods include rewards for good ideas.

Then there is MasterCard’s InnovationExpress, described by Lyons as an “internal hack-a-thon”.

“We lock them in a hotel for 48 hours and they address business problems, gather ideas, create a working prototype of their solution, produce a video presentation and submit a high-level marketing plan for that,” he says. “We make it a competition and give prizes. It is very energising, it is an infectious environment. People are enthusiastic and people feel empowered.”

What kinds of ideas get through? One delivered what might be the next generation of digital shopping. Say you are reading an online magazine and see something you like. The service allows you to make an immediate purchase without being moved away from your magazine to visit a shopping site. According to Lyons, the idea has already been taken up.

Another company that encourages employee innovation is timeshare/exchange holiday company RCI. “Frontline staff get direct feedback from customers and can bring this back to management,” explains Frank Buckley, director of resource planning management at RCI. “Equally, you have people with a 10- or 15-year tenure with the company. You are talking about tapping into valuable experience.”

Gaining insights provided through these channels can bring efficiencies, additions to existing products, new revenue streams and more, so the ideas that arise are directly valuable, he believes. Headquartered in the UK, the company also employs 350 in Mahon, Cork. It operates the New Ideas Lab as a way to harvest good ideas for the benefit of the company, staff and customers.

“The New Ideas Lab has a defined process and uses a SharePoint site to link employees across the company,” he says. “If you have an idea for example about revenue, efficiencies or adding value you can fill in an idea and drop it into the site.”

Others have access to the SharePoint site and can see the idea as it moves forward for consideration. If it passes an initial assessment, it is sent to staff in a position to implement the idea to see if it has merit and is suitable for implementing. Ideas can’t just be parked, he says; the idea has to go through the assessment process and has to be logged as having been studied.

AbbVie is yet another major company that keeps in touch with its 21,000 employees worldwide in order to learn from them ways to innovate.

“Innovation is a key pillar of AbbVie’s strategy for success. We see it as vital for the strength and growth of our company,” says Denis Broderick, site director at AbbVie Sligo. “AbbVie sees it as crucial to our company and employee growth that we constantly tap into the resources at our fingertips – namely, the massive creative potential our employees possess.”

The company runs a number of programmes to facilitate the flow of ideas from staff, with one major one known as TRY.

“The TRY campaign encourages employees from all functions to create ideas on how we can improve the way we work,” says Edel Woods, the company’s director of customer excellence.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a small change or a whole new way to approach work and each idea submitted is considered by the TRY committee, she says.

Once studied, the committee can elect to set up a pilot or give the idea a “try” – hence the name of the scheme. Whether successful or not, the ideas are still taken to the Go Innovate Team and shared in the hope of creating more ideas. “Creativity sparks more creativity.”

Another unique approach encourages employees to think like children rather than as adults , Woods adds. “A key part of innovation and creativity is to help employees to be playful. By this we mean that we believe there are advantages to be gained from having fun, being playful and bringing lots of energy to your thinking, like children do.”

The idea is help staff think with the energy, freshness and enthusiasm of a child in order to stimulate creative thought.

“Children play in the moment and do not think ahead to what the outcome may need to be. They are not looking to see what will happen later, but enjoy and give their full energy and passion to the moment.”

They are also expansive in their thinking, they do not see limits to what happens during play. “Being expansive in our thinking and playful with ideas creates a space to go beyond our limiting thinking and idea creation,” Woods says. “At least for a while anything is possible.”

Another approach involves customer-facing employees to send in their ideas and observations as they interact with the customer, says Ryan Quigley, general manager at AbbVie Dublin. In one, employees are trained as “insight gurus” to help them see how innovative ideas can change things for the better for customers and also themselves.

In another, the “wish you were here” programme, staff dealing with customers directly are given postcards and encouraged to jot down observations and ideas and then send them along to Quigley.

“The observations land on my desk and give me a wide range of insights directly from the customer-facing teams that I might otherwise not have received,” he says. “This has delivered many positive impacts for our business, for the working lives of our customers and the lives of the patients who use the medicines we produce.”